Spontaneity and I have had an interesting relationship lately. Normally I’m a pretty grounded person. I need a safety net before I’m confident I can do things without having them horribly backfire. But I started experimenting with spontaneity, and it worked out in my favor so I started delving deeper and deeper into this strange world of doing things you hadn’t planned on doing. It gets addicting, that feeling of freedom you feel when you jump off your own beaten path. It builds.

This evening, as I walked past the train station on my way home, it came alive and developed a voice.

One of the few perks of being a soldier in the Israeli army is that you get free public transportation. There are a few limitations on it, but realistically you can get on any bus or train going anywhere in the country for free, so long as you’re in uniform and have your army ID. I’m not quite ready to get on a bus I don’t recognize, but the train? So long as you know where the train station is, it’s easy to get back to wherever you started from.

So what’s stopping me? It’s 7:00 in the evening and I just ate dinner. Breakfast is usually the box of cornflakes I keep in a drawer in the office. The only things I really need for tomorrow are my uniform and my ID. My base is right next to a train station, and if there’s one cool thing about this country it’s that you can get to Tel Aviv from anywhere that trains travel in less than two hours.

I could just get on a train, pick a random city, explore it for a night, and catch the first morning train back to Tel Aviv. Is there really any reason I can’t do that?

That wasn’t my voice, though. Not really. That was the voice of spontaneity, urging me to succumb. And I wanted to. Wanted to just forget about walking the rest of the way to my apartment, to cross the bridge to the train station, get on some random train and figure out the rest when I get there.

But I’m tired. I file away the idea for some other time. Maybe when I’m not so tired, maybe when I feel like I can stay up all night without too many consequences the next day. But now it’s not spontaneous. It’s planned. I’ll have to take it a step farther if I want to feel that freedom.

One day I will find myself in the middle Guatemala, and I’ll have no clue as to why. That’s not true. I’ll have some clue. It will be because of that one night when I walked past the train station, and got an idea.